How Realtors can provide their own customized search engine

Few people know this story.

In the mid-1990s, two bright young men from Stanford University approached the founders of Yahoo and offered to sell them this cool new Internet search program they had created working late at night in the university lab. They called the product “Back Rub.”

And their asking price for “Back Rub” was not cheap. They wanted a whopping $1 million.

Yahoo politely thanked them for their time, but said the technology did not fit their overall strategy, and they wished (gulp) them success with their endeavor.

You probably guessed who those two young men were by now – billionaires Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Their technology – an Internet search platform that later would be renamed “Google.”

A decade and $197 billion later (Google’s market cap), it’s obvious Yahoo missed the boat on that one. Well, not just the boat. They missed the entire fleet.

Look at Google’s stats:

— 10.6 billion people conducted searches on Google in Nov. 2010 (comScore.com)

— the next nearest site was Yahoo (sorry to keep rubbing this in guys) with 2.6 billion searches

— Google has a 66% share of ALL searches in the US

— as of Wed., 1/11/11 – their stock was at $617.50 per share (Yahoo was $16.72)

— Google’s Android mobile platform just overtook the Apple iPhone for total smart phone market share – 26%

— Do home buyers use search? You bet they do – 84% of home buyers search for properties online (National Association of Realtors)

Okay, you get it. Search is huge.

Now take your typically sharp real estate agent – they take great care to display the right business card with a picture of their warm, smiling face. And they always dress sharp. Their car is clean, impressive and exudes success.

But as we can see by the stats above, prospects are not looking for you on the street or at your office. They are searching the web and coming across your site, where you have 3 seconds to wow them.

So what are you doing to dress up your web site lately?

Consider adding a search platform you can call your own – SpatialMatch’s map-based neighborhood and lifestyle search engine with 104 layers of neighborhood data, now adding IDX real estate listings in each market.

In essence, you can customize this search platform to make it seem like your own search engine.

Here’s how:

– integrate your logo and contact information into the technology.

– add a custom message in the ticker across the top offering free maps, recent listings, etc.

– make the landing page for the search map coincide with a neighborhood you are promoting or focusing on.

Unlike Yahoo, you don’t want to miss the boat on this one.

Get in the search business NOW by placing the most advanced real estate search technology available today on your site.

It’s been a strategy that (wink, wink) sort of worked out for Google. It will do the same for you.

(To sign up for a demo of SpatialMatch and how it can increase your sales, click here).